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Allen Morgan is by far, the most likeable VC I've met in 20 years in the industry. I would work with him in a second and refer numerous deals to him. You can trust him. He is fair and respectful to founders. He has strong operating experience. He's done around 1000 deals as a lawyer and VC. I'm not being paid to write this, honestly. I just love the guy. So does every other founder that I know who knows him. It's no surprise we all flock to him for advice. He's the mentor of mentors in the Valley.

Posted by
anonymous
on 2008-09-10

PUBLIC:

We are a company in the greentech space. Were introduced to Navin by a mutual person we know. He took the meeting in 24 hours. He knew about us and the space. Took him ten minutes to understand what we do and from then it was a colloborative discussion. he mapped us to similar cos in the traditional IT space. we are really impressed as we haven't met anyone who can connect industries so easily. We hope we can get him as an investor as he has already given us ideas on where we can take this.

I've had the opportunity to work with Yogen on two companies. Frankly, I could not say enough good things about him. I really liked the firm and would definitely put them at the top of my list for my next company.

Robin Vasan and Yogan Dalal are class acts. Janice Roberts is totally unreliable, she will promise meetings, change them several times at the last minute. She'' be gracious enough during the meeting, will make you admire her expensive shoes, then you will never hear from her again. Email, voicemail, nothing will get her attention.

Posted by
Meritocrat
on 2008-01-14

PUBLIC:

The fund has proved to be a strong, long term supporter of the company through difficult times including the economic recession. Much of this support was due to Kevin Fong. In a number of cases he overcame the overall partnership's concerns when the company was sailing into the headwind and some his partners were getting cold feet. It can matter who is your lead at the firm - the clout varies substantially, so choose carefully. The fund is effective at helping you with business development opportunities on an ongoing basis, and is well connected generally. Kevin is a strong board member with more relevant experience than many, and the ability to bring balance to board discussions. I would always look to them again.

Posted by
Anonymous
on 2007-10-29

PUBLIC:

I had a first meeting with Allen Morgan and was very impressed. He was friendly, personable, and expressed a genuine interest in the idea I was pitching. Even if I do not wind-up working with Mayfield, I feel that Allen was genuine and someone that I would be able to contact for advice in the future.

Posted by
anonymous
on 2007-10-09

PUBLIC:

There appears to be two camps at Mayfield, one aligned with Kevin Fong and one aligned with Yogen Dalal. Partners are essentially grouped into one of the two and this creates a strange and unproductive dynamic for entrepreneurs who could benefit from the insight of more than just the partners from the particular camp.

Further, partners who have made a lot of money seem to be extremely checked out

Posted by
ivanivanobrockovich
on 2007-09-12

PUBLIC:

David Ladd is one of the first people I go to when I am working on a new project. He is especially expert in the telecom space, and is a good skeptic (without being arrogant or disrespectful). Every time I have met with him, I learned something from the meeting and sometimes left with useful suggestions that we could incorporate into the business or product.

Mayfield also backed a friends company. While his company ultimately failed (his product was fine, but too early), he had only good experiences with the firm. They supported him until the very end through some very difficult times.

Funny link by Greg Royal about how Mayfield was so proactive: http://www.networkworld.com/community...Not 20 minutes after SunRocket crashed and burned, Mayfield fund has removed all reference to SunRocket from it's website. But thanks to Google it is cached.
"We remain very excited about the market opportunity. Right now we see early adopters, people switching because of price. In the future we'll have more features to offer, a value-add play," said Mayfield Managing Director Janice Roberts, a SunRocket board member."

During a recent series A process with Mayfield, we probably spent more time pitching various partners, prep meetings, etc, etc. than at any of the other VCs we talked to, and were more or less led to believe that we were going to get a term sheet after our pitch to the full partnership. No such luck. I was quite disappointed in how much time they consumed while providing very strong "go" signals.